Well, there is a slew of toys available for preorder now for spring, lol.

Think of all the great marketing opportunities missed as people slug it out on Black Friday for Baby Yoda dolls.

IMO if you can see the color grading, you've gone too far. Unless you're making a particularly stylized film.

Disney-era Star Wars toys haven’t been selling and licensees had no reason to think The Mandalorian would be different. I guess Disney could have paid them to do it, but they also had no reason to think The Mandalorian might be different.

Total change of topic, but did you know the last episode of the Mandalorian was written by Jon Favreau and directed by Taika Waititi? Weird.

Anyway, yeah, Disney had no reason to think the Mandalorian would be better received than their recent movies. Just throwing good money after bad trying to merchandise it, really. Loss leader to get the Star Wars zealots to subscribe.

You're right but what do you think is the root of their incompetence with regards to the Star Wars franchise? Maybe it's as simple as just pointing the finger at Kathleen Kennedy. Actually, that's impossible. If all of this failure is a result solely on her direction, somebody put her in that position and allowed her to have that sort of unchecked ability to ruin a saga and decimate a franchise.

Kathleen Kennedy was George Lucas’s protege, and she’s running the company the exact same way Lucas did; they never planned the previous trilogies either.

Think about it this way. Disney bought an already successful company to continue to be a success. You don’t change stuff that’s working. I mean, clearly it wasn’t ever working and should have been changed, but we know that because we follow Star Wars. Iger doesn’t know **** about Star Wars, so from his perspective changing Lucasfilm too much too soon would be threatening its value.

That's probably mostly correct except for the fact that most of us probably don't like aspects of the prequel trilogy but probably don't have major problems with the overall story that was told. It's almost exactly the opposite with the sequel trilogy. The prequel trilogy also seems pretty well planned and mirrors the original trilogy in a way I mentioned previously. The first film is completely stand alone and almost irrelevant to the next two. The next two being much more closely connected to each other. Obviously with the original trilogy the reason for this is much different than for the prequel trilogy.

So despite all this and with all the recent controversies surrounding the Star Wars name has the value actually been hurt?

Sure, but that’s not saying much. Planning is really about communication. If you only have one author (like the prequels) then you have a much lower need for planning.

ANH, ESB, and RotJ each had different writers and directors working without a plan, but at least they all had the same editor (who notably didn’t shy away from rewriting the story in post). Even so, Star Wars was clearly starting to go off the rails by RotJ with its twists and reveals. They needed another big reveal like ESB so they pulled the twin sister thing out of their butts. If they’d made Episode 7 in 1986 it probably would have revealed that Han Solo is Luke’s mom.

The prequels were not planned at all. Lucas was a notorious procrastinator and didn’t deliver the screenplays until the last minute. Basically all they ever had was “obi wan trains Vader and then vader knocks up a girl and then obi wan and Vader fight in a volcano”, and Lucas winged the rest.

So really the problem here is that Lucasfilms not a very good studio. They have a long history of mismanaging properties. What Disney should have done is bought the IP and shuttered Lucasfilm, but like I said that goes at right angles to how acquisitions typically work.



Its hard to say. I mean, empirically. It’s really hard to figure out how well brand advertising works, for example, so it’s correspondingly hard to figure out how much brands have been damaged in the long term.

So, like, imagine these movies had Coca-cola tie ins: coca-cola presents Star Wars the force awakens. Now you associate coca-cola with a dumb boring movie. How much was coca-colas brand damaged by that? Hard to say.

Short term, it’s definitely lost cachet with the public and critics. There’s just less interest in seeing Star Wars movies now. Licensees have also lost interest, but that’s because nobody wants to buy toys based on a dumb boring movie - they’ll come back when the money does. It probably also hasn’t affected their core audience much, if they ever figure out how to make a new TIE Fighter game (even their core audience isn’t buying new trilogy merch).

if the name “Star Wars” has been subconsciously associated with “boring ****”, though, then it’s kinda over.

Well, so I guess, with the prequels there was one unifying aspect, Lucas, whereas that didn't exist later. I appreciate your opinions on this. How much is just a change in the times? For example, could a contemporary version of Tie Fighter actually sell today?

Back when they were new games like Dark Forces were pretty popular but a modern day equivalent might be a game like Alien Isolation and as good as that was I doubt it was the same kind of success that similar older games were.

OT merch is still a successful category despite NT/PT headwinds, so I don’t think it’s a change in the times so much as that Lucasfilm mismanaged the property. Films can access a larger audience than sci fi novels and PC games ever can, so it’s complicated to guess what might have been if they’d stuck with the relatively more favoured but lower revenue EU. I would guess that a Thrawn trilogy adaptation would have been a wild success though.

Sony would probably cover the costs if you made it a PSVR2 exclusive, so that might not actually matter. But I don’t know. If you right-sized the budget I’m sure you could sell millions of copies, just probably not enough to recoup EA’s gigantic and wasteful budgets (which naturally includes the managers’ 15000 sqft SoCal houses, private jets and maseratis, which is usually the real problem).

A modern day equivalent for the Star Wars themed Doom clone would be a Star Wars themed Doom 2016 clone. The reason we aren’t getting that game is because EA wants to throw infinity dollars at a single mediocre title that has something for everybody, which they can monetize forever.

Probably the only reason we got a Star Wars themed God of War 4 clone is because Disney told them they had to publish something that would get positive press for a change or lose the license.

The Star Wars brand is definitely salvageable. They really just need to restructure Lucasfilm and put different talent in the right places. Then outline a new trilogy and keep the same writers on board for all three. You can't plan out every line of dialogue or turn of events in practice, because it's not until you begin filming already that you get a grasp of actor chemistry and how audiences will receive what you're saying, and your story will have to adapt a bit. But at least know where you're going. Don't do strange things, like kill off your mystery box villain in the second film to replace him with a mystery box old villain in the third. Or randomly add character points in the third film which have no establishment in the previous entries. Or..

i really hope lucasfilm survies this

I miss when it was always my expectation that there would be a finite number of Star Wars movies

where is my X-Wing books miniseries adaptation. easy season of television w/ ensemble cast for any of the better Rogue/Wraith squadron books.

To be honest, Lucasfilm didn't really do much else that was great. I guess they own Indiana Jones too, right? Last one was pretty bad in some ways. They do need to do another one of those, though, so they can pass the torch off to a woman, preferably non-white, non-cis.

The new movies are making billions, why does anyone think "lucasfilm" will not survive?

I don't think they're netting billions and I think they are struggling to find successful merchandise compared to the past. Lucasfilm could be shuttered for squandering the property. Star Wars itself wouldn't go away.

Event Cost (m) Revenue (m) Profit
Acquisition $4,050.00 $0.00 -$4,050.00
Galaxy’s Edge CA $1,000.00 $0.00 -$1,000.00
Galaxy’s Edge FL $1,000.00 $0.00 -$1,000.00
Force Awakens $259.00 $2,068.00 $1,809.00
Rogue One $200.00 $1,056.00 $856.00
The Last Jedi $262.00 $1,332.00 $1,070.00
Solo $275.00 $393.00 $118.00
Rise of Skywalker* $275.00 $1,100.00 $825.00

Total $7,321.00 $5,949.00 -$1,372.00

I mean

Those numbers don't include marketing, promotion, or other overhead. But it also doesn't include merchandising. Mostly because none of those numbers are publicly available. I would guess overhead is bigger than merchandising but if you'd like it to be a wash we can call it a wash.

So far Disney's return on investment since 2012 is -19%. For comparison, if Disney had put that money into a Nasdaq index fund in 2012, they'd have $19.6 billion. I believe the technical term for what Disney has done is "boondoggle".

Seems like you're discounting the current and future value of the rides in CA and FL. They were struggling with low Disneyland attendance and did a bit of a marketing push, and then over the holidays it was so crowded they actually stopped letting people in. Obviously I'm not in that business (nor the movie business, nor the video game business).

I’m not discussing future values at all. The current value is $0 because so far it’s been a hard flop. Maybe it’s turned around like you say. We should know by early February, because if they have good news they will put numbers to it in their Q1 earnings report, and if not they will publish yet another PR plant about how their failure is intentional.

Currently Galaxy's Edge is losing money, from the Q4 call. They are going to struggle to even make it profitable in the short. Then it's going to take a LONG time to recoup the initial investment, if ever (that 1 bn could be returning money on the market, not to mention profits lost from not using that primo Anaheim real estate efficiently).

From what we know Disney Star Wars merch isn't doing too hot, either. So really you have a trilogy of films which are making okay money, each of which is losing far more interest than the last.

They're currently in a multibillion hole and there's no clear trajectory out. Disney's not doing great here.

I'd watch this. Bonus points if they bring Allston on as an EP but not Stackpole.

EDIT: I've just discovered this became impossible in 2014, never mind.

What happened in 2014? Is that when they threw out the EU? Disney is clearly not above pillaging the EU when it suits their needs.

I think its because Allston died that year.

Damn, he died? WTF? I've still got to finish his last X-Wing novel.

I was wondering if something like that was the case but I was too busy not being able to fall asleep to check. I've got a bunch of xwing books but haven't read any of them.

So this new thing about Disney now going to a new dating format for Star Wars sounds like an April Fools Day prank but BBY and ABY are no more. We now have BSI and ASI for Before and After Starkiller Incident although I don't think it's too hard to come up with alternate meanings for them.

Gee, I can't imagine going to school in the SW universe and learning all of the period acronyms that divide the timeline arbitrarily everytime someone blows up a super weapon.

Pretty brave of them to renormalize their timeline around a movie that nobody will remember in 5 years.

Did anyone watch The Clone Wars animated series? I have Disney+ and ... really nothing to watch on there so I tried it.

How was it?

I watched some episodes and didn't think it was very good, although I've heard nothing but praise of it from people. So I don't know. I tend not to like kids' animation.

heh, this kinda looks like a Protoss

I watched some episodes like 11 or 12 years ago. Then 2 or 3 years ago I looked up the chronological order of them and watched the first one. They're okay but I'm just not interested in them anymore and I don't Jane a way to watch them either so whatever.

Edit-so I like to use the swipe method on SwiftKey and I haven't caught it enough times correcting "have" to Jane so now it posts Jane when I'm swiping "have". Hopefully this edit helped.

Well at least in that case the date acronym change is indexed to a different event. In the real world we just change the acronym and pretend it now has nothing to do with Jesus Christ.

The Clone Wars is fun in small dose, but should never be watched in order of release. I recommend starting on Season 4 Episodes 7-9 for one of the best arcs in the story. If you don't like the show you've at least seen some of the best it has to offer.

The dating desaster turned out to be just a misunderstanding. Apparently in their visual guides they always use a dating system relative to the time period the guide is for. I guess to better see how far away related events are.
So, BBY and ABY will remain the true dating system.

Especially the Clone Wars movie and the first season sucked. I didn't like the rest as much as most other people apparently did, but it gets better.

That actually doesn't make any sense but since I don't have any "Visual Guides" I cannot confirm or deny that excuse. I did think it was funny to see 0 BSI, 0 ASI, and 1 ASI for these last three anti-fanfilms though.